As a child, Lytle Denny learned where blue grouse, ruffed grouse, sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage grouse lived. A member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, he scouted the high-desert landscape during family hunting trips on the tribes’ ancestral homelands in southeastern Idaho. His dad preferred hunting deer and elk, but Denny developed an affinity for grouse.
The family hunted together as a group. Denny moved quietly through the silver-green sagebrush, hoping to hear the sudden heavy wingbeats of a startled bird. His family watched, waiting for a flush, not just of grouse but of mammals, too. “So it worked together,” he said. “We’d get birds and big game.”
As Denny got older, though, he saw fewer sage grouse. These distinctive, chicken-sized birds with their thick white chest feathers and brown, sunbeam-shaped tail feathers are culturally significant to the Shoshone-Bannock people, a rich source of song, dance, stories and nourishment. Denny noticed that other animals, including ground squirrels and mule deer, were declining as well. More farms were replacing the sagebrush that covered the foothills near the reservation. More cattle grazed the area, too. As their numbers increased, so did drought and wildfires.
By his late teens, Denny knew he wanted to pursue a career in fish and wildlife biology. He learned about the conflicts between sage grouse and cattle. The birds return faithfully to their open mating grounds, or leks, every spring to perform one of North America’s most striking mating displays: Males gulp a gallon of air and strut, strumming their stiffened chest feathers with their wings to create two loud swishes, then inflating and contracting the two yellow air sacs on their chests with a couple of inimitable popping sounds. But livestock grazing disturbed this yearly ritual; in some areas, Denny saw ranchers drive out onto open leks in their ATVs and throw salt licks out for cows. Sharp-tailed grouse continued to perform their mating dances in the area, but sage grouse left. “I started asking questions like, ‘Why are we letting this happen?’” Denny said. “I didn’t have any stake in livestock. I had value in the land, in plants and animals.”
Sage grouse have become a rare and special sight. Denny doesn’t hunt them anymore. Whenever he sees one, he’ll stop and watch.
Today, at 46, Denny is the deputy executive director of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Natural Resources Division. Both the Shoshone-Bannock and the Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon are confronting cattle grazing’s impact on native plants and animals, including sage grouse, in the high-desert sagebrush steppe that covers much of the West. This vast landscape is the ancestral territory of the Shoshone-Bannock, a confederation of the Eastern and Western bands of the Northern Shoshone and the Bannock tribes, or Northern Paiute.
Since 1965, sage grouse populations in the West have declined by 80%, with birds in the Great Basin — which spans Nevada and parts of Idaho, Oregon and Utah — experiencing the most dramatic declines. The birds, considered a keystone species that indicate the overall health of their ecosystem, have been the subject of litigation and land-use battles for decades, and advocates have attempted, unsuccessfully, to place them on the federal endangered species list numerous times. It’s estimated that there may have been 16 million sage grouse living in 13 states and three Canadian provinces before non-Native settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. Now, about 350,000 remain, according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Half of the species’ original habitat is gone, replaced by farms, cow pastures, invasive grasses, mines and oil and gas fields.
The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the majority of sage grouse habitat, blames the decline on habitat loss and degradation from drought, wildfire and invasive grasses. But federal officials often fail to mention livestock grazing — the most widespread commercial land use in the West by acreage — as an underlying factor. Ranching interests, largely concentrated among corporations like multinational conglomerate J.R. Simplot Co., which also grows potatoes for McDonald’s, have a powerful hold on federal land-management policy — even though cattle that graze on public land account for less than 2% of the nation’s beef supply. Nearly all the remaining sage grouse habitat is open to grazing.
Some tribal members and scientists, including Denny, as well as non-Native advocacy organizations like the Western Watersheds Project, have urged a reckoning with extensive public-lands grazing, which they say threatens not just sage grouse, but the entire sagebrush steppe ecosystem and the many other significant species it supports, including sagebrush, mule deer and jackrabbits. Settler-colonial notions of the West may have framed the sagebrush steppe as cattle country, but “cows are an invasive species,” said Diane Teeman, a Burns Paiute tribal elder and former manager of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Department. Grazing, Teeman said, is causing “permanent damage to a lot of things here.”
“Cows are an invasive species.”
The threat grazing poses to sage grouse has become even more dire under the current Trump administration. Last July, the administration rescinded a BLM policy that required prioritizing environmental reviews of grazing in areas critical for at-risk species like sage grouse, and in October, the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture released a plan that called for expanding the number of acres open to grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands. In December, the BLM finalized new sage grouse management plans for several Western states, including Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming, that ease restrictions on oil, gas and mining and lift a previous requirement that ranchers in Idaho, California and Nevada keep grasses at least 7 inches tall to protect grouse nests from predators.
Both the Burns Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, meanwhile, are modeling ways to reduce grazing on the landscape. The Burns Paiute Tribe has significantly cut the number of cows that are allowed to graze on tribal lands, while the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes plan to reevaluate herd size on reservation lands. The results are promising, revealing how restricting cattle could benefit native wildlife, including sage grouse. But applying such efforts to public lands would require undoing generations of deeply ingrained beliefs about grazing’s place in the West. Cows are woven into the very fabric of Western colonial identity, Denny said. To tug at the threads in any way “is to go straight against settler-colonial values.”
“That’s the real battle,” he said, “whose values are getting precedence over whose.”
THE SAGEBRUSH STEPPE is not a showy place with towering trees like the Pacific Northwest’s coastal forests. The landscape is often seen from behind the wheel on a two-lane highway, a pastel-green filler passing alongside blurred white road lines and fence posts. Juniper trees grow sparsely; mule deer rest in their shade. Sagebrush itself — a branching, fragrant shrub with narrow lobed leaves — rarely exceeds five feet in height. The ecosystem’s diversity flourishes closer to the ground, where the understory is colored by the blossoms of yellow hawksbeard and purple sagebrush mariposa lilies, interspersed with the black, green, gold and white flecks of biological soil crusts.
These miniscule crusts, made up of lichens, mosses, green algae and cyanobacteria, are key to the ecosystem’s health.The crustfunctions like organic armor, retaining moisture, cycling nutrients and preventing non-native plant invasions. When the crusts break apart, other plant communities fall apart. “I used the word ‘fragile’ talking about our soils,” Teeman said. “There is a delicate balance.”
In a healthy high-desert landscape, soil crusts cover the ground in clumps. Sagebrush grows scattered and bunchgrasses fill the space between. Sage grouse rest under the modest canopy and lay speckled eggs in ground nests surrounded by tall grasses that protect the brood against predators like ravens and coyotes. Insects crawl on the abundant wildflowers, and both feed sage grouse and their chicks.
But over generations, extensive cattle grazing has transformed this vast landscape. Herds compacted the fragile soils, making the ground hard and dry. The land can no longer hold as much water, exacerbating drought and fueling the wildfire cycle. “You walk across a grazed area, and it’s like walking on a parking lot,” said Boone Kauffman, an Oregon State University ecologist. In an ungrazed area, he said, it’s like “walking on a marshmallow.”
Cattle also spread invasive cheatgrass, which chokes out native grasses and turns entire hillsides maroon in the spring. Sage grouse and most other wildlife avoid areas heavily infested with cheatgrass, which began to spread across the West in the late 1800s, in part due to livestock: Seeds stick to the animals’ hooves and hides, and when those hooves break the soil crusts in areas that are also overgrazed and depleted of native grasses, it can create openings for them to germinate.
Cows devour bunchgrasses, exposing sage grouse nests to predators. They congregate near water, trampling streambanks and chomping on wildflowers, willows and aspens. These riparian areas normally serve as critical oases in the desert, providing food and shade and supporting the region’s plant and animal life. “Every riparian area in the West has been hammered,” said Roger Rosentreter, a retired BLM Idaho state botanist.
Water troughs built for cows create hazards where sage grouse and other birds can drown. Barbed-wire fences injure grouse by snagging their wings and sometimes severing their heads, and insecticides aimed at protecting plants for cattle kill the grasshoppers and crickets that are critical food for grouse chicks.
Rare bird: Sage grouse are both unique and imperiled
Much of sage grouse physiology and behavior — from the yellow air sacs that males inflate during mating displays to the species’ preference for eating plants — is unusual for a bird.
Avian evolution has favored light weight for easier flight, leading to hollow bones and small organs. But sage grouse evolved “heavy machinery,” as Boise State University researcher Jennifer Forbey described it — large organs and specialized guts — to digest sagebrush leaves, which are toxic to most animals.
From September to February, sage grouse eat sagebrush almost exclusively, preferring the tiny, silver-green leaves of low-growing species like early and mountain big sage. Scientists have found that these species fluoresce under ultraviolet light due to chemical properties in their leaves. Sage grouse have photoreceptors in their eyes that allow them to see UV light, and researchers like Forbey think that this glow may help the birds locate the plants. Female grouse teach their chicks where to find food, passing on what Forbey called “nutritional wisdom.” Both males and females return to the same breeding, nesting and chick-rearing sites every year, generation after generation.
But the birds’ loyalty and diet are no longer well-suited for today’s landscape, transformed since settlers arrived.
Every year, 1.3 million acres of sagebrush steppe is lost, primarily to wildfires fueled by cheatgrass that has spread, in part, by way of extensive livestock grazing. Unfortunately, animals that rely heavily on one food source — like koalas, pandas and sage grouse — “tend to be the most vulnerable to extinction,” Forbey said.
— Josephine Woolington
“Those cumulative effects of grazing,” Rosentreter said, “are sealing the coffin on so many of our native wildlife.”
Ranching’s dominion over the West began in the mid-1800s, when cattle barons — aided by the federal government’s westward-expansion policies and the forcible removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples — built vast ranching empires on tribal lands. Hundreds of thousands of cows grazed on the tall bunchgrasses of the sagebrush steppe, which the newcomers and government dubbed “the range,” a term that later morphed into “rangeland” and is now widely used to describe the sagebrush steppe. Rangeland scientists like Karen Launchbaugh, a professor at the University of Idaho, consider it an ecological term, not a commodity term. But other scholars say it is by nature colonial.“Rangelands are inescapably implicated in the conquest and settlement of North America,” wrote Nathan Sayre, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2023 book about rangeland history.
Rangeland science developed hand-in-hand with the livestock industry. By the early 1900s, livestock herds had decimated native vegetation in the West, and ranchers needed help. Only 16% of public rangeland was in good condition, according to a 1934 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA scientists began studying non-native grasses and forage crops that could grow in the high desert, and universities across the West developed range-management programs to help the livestock industry survive. The research, supported by the federal government, informed many of the laws and policies that still govern the Western rangelands.
A major component of the government’s early range-management programs involved seeding the depleted lands with non-native crested wheatgrass, which ranchers favored for its agreeable taste to livestock and ability to withstand heavy grazing. The federal government also killed sagebrush on several million acres in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming, spraying the shrubs with herbicide and then seeding the ground with crested wheatgrass and turning the silver-green landscape gold. As a result, grazing capacity skyrocketed across the region — by 800% in Elko, Nevada, alone, according to a 1954 USDA report.
While rangeland science has shifted in recent years to become more attuned to ecological needs, the work remains rooted in livestock economics. Oregon State University’s rangeland science extension center in Burns, for example, “helps maintain a robust and sustainable cattle industry in Oregon,” according to its university web page. Both Rosentreter and Kauffman said that it’s difficult to find funding for studies that investigate grazing’s ecological impacts. In 2022, after Kauffman published two studies that found that grazing degraded public land, local cattle industry leaders called for his removal from Oregon State University, he said. “There’s a real pressure, and probably unprecedented pressure at the moment, on state and federally funded scientists to not go against the cattle industry.”
The livestock industry has also funded rangeland science.A June 2025 report by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Idaho’s Rangeland Center found that livestock grazing on federal land in Idaho did not negatively impact sage grouse nesting success. Among the report’s biggest funders were two ranching advocacy groups, the Public Lands Council and Idaho Cattle Association, which provided in-kind donations of trucks, ATVs, camper trailers, laptops and other equipment, according to an email from Courtney Conway, a USGS wildlife biologist and a co-author of the report.
In March 2024, well before the report was published, the Public Lands Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association released a statement urging the BLM to incorporate its findings in its sage grouse management plans, which the agency did, in plans finalized in December. In an emailed statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires wrote that the agency “does not rely solely on any single publication” for habitat management decisions, though he declined to say whether or not pressure from industry groups factored into the BLM’s inclusion of the report.
In an interview on the rural community network RFD-TV, Kaitlynn Glover, an executive director of government affairs for both industry groups, said that the report confirms what ranchers have known for generations: Grazing has made landscapes healthier and sustained sage grouse populations. “But we needed the science to prove it,” she said.
TODAY, MORE THAN 200 MILLION acres — 85% — of Western public lands are grazed by livestock, mainly beef cows. Livestock industry leaders have long argued that ranchers are key to sage grouse conservation, since cows need open land to forage, just like sage grouse do. Prominent Oregon rancher Tom Sharp coined a popular tagline, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” and some scientists agree. “Generally, we think of livestock grazing as being very compatible with sage grouse conservation,” said Skyler Vold, sage grouse biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Some rangeland scientists and the BLM say that modern grazing practices have improved to the point that they no longer degrade the landscape. “Well-managed livestock grazing is not considered a threat to greater sage-grouse habitat or survival,” Hires, the BLM’s press secretary, wrote in an emailed statement.
But the definition of “well-managed” grazing depends on who you ask. “There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit that focuses on grazing’s ecological impact on public lands.
Land managers and scientists classify grazing levels as light, moderate or heavy, depending on the amount of vegetation that livestock eat each year on a BLM grazing allotment. But this is hard to measure at large scales; some federal allotments can span 250,000 acres or more. To measure plant consumption, the BLM typically conducts “ocular assessments,” Molvar said — basically, eyeballing the landscape. “In science, we call that a wild guess.” (The BLM wrote that the agency “employs multiple data collection and assessment methods” to measure livestock plant consumption. The method used depends on several factors, including “the resources available to collect the information.”)
“There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”
The BLM permits cows to eat 50% of native plants annually on the majority of federal allotments and 60% of non-native plants like crested wheatgrass. An oft-cited 1999 paper, which scientists like Rosentreter say is still relevant, concluded that a 50% utilization rate may classify as “moderate,” meaning it maintains landscape conditions, for areas that see more precipitation, like the Southern pine forests of Georgia. But in semi-arid ecosystems like the sagebrush steppe, this level of consumption degrades the land. The study defined moderate grazing in dry areas as being 35% to 45% of the vegetation. To improve rangeland conditions in these environments, cows would have to eat even less — 30% to 35% — of the vegetation, or about 40% less than the BLM currently permits. In the recent University of Idaho study that concluded that grazing did not harm sage grouse — the report ranching interests supported — cows ate on average just 22% of plants, a level that’s considered light grazing and is practiced by few ranchers on public land.
Research from Oregon State University’s extension center in Burns has found that targeted grazing can reduce invasive grasses. This kind of grazing, however, requires ranchers to isolate cows in small fenced pastures and move them frequently, a practice common on private land but difficult to execute on large public allotments. “Sometimes the research is pointing to or identifying tools that are, under our current system, almost impossible to implement,” said Mark Salvo, program director for the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a conservation nonprofit.
For grazing to reduce invasive grasses, it has to be carefully managed, said Austin Smith, natural resources director and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs in central Oregon. The tribe leases some of its land to local ranchers in the John Day Valley, allowing cows to eat invasive grasses as they grow in the early spring. “But then you get them off the landscape and with enough time for these other plants to come in and grow,” he said. On BLM lands, he added, “they just hammer the heck out of it.”
Science has found that grazing can both harm and help sage grouse habitat, but “it’s a question of how it’s managed,” said Nada Wolff Culver, the BLM’s former principal deputy director during the Biden administration. But for decades, the BLM has lacked the staffing to adequately manage its grazing allotments. BLM data obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) showed that 56.7 million acres — about 37% — of federal grazing allotments failed to meet BLM land-health standards from 1997 through 2023, primarily because of livestock grazing. In a 2023 federal lawsuit against the BLM, PEER and the Western Watersheds Project alleged that the agency had not conducted environmental reviews for nearly two-thirds of its grazing permits.
“I think it’s a failed system,” said Teeman, the Burns Paiute tribal elder.
COLLIN WILLIAMS STEPPED OUT of his white truck in camouflage rubber boots, surprised by the dry ground. “It’s been just like mud-bogging up here every time because of all the snowmelt,” said Williams, a non-Native wildlife biologist who works for the Burns Paiute Tribe.
It was dawn in April on BLM land east of the small town of Burns, in southeastern Oregon. Water had been so abundant recently that in late March, snowmelt from the Strawberry Mountains inundated the tribe’s reservation north of Burns, flooding and damaging homes. But the above-average snowpack was welcome news for sage grouse. Good water years in the arid high desert bring more wildflowers and insects for grouse and their chicks to eat.
With a clipboard in hand, Williams and his colleague, Matthew Hanneman, the tribe’s wildlife program manager, who is also non-Native, walked quietly to a vantage point where they could tally sage grouse. The first hint of sunrise burned the horizon orange as Williams and Hanneman scanned the area’s several leks with binoculars. About 60 males were performing their signature mating dance. They appeared spherical from afar as they strutted in the near-freezing air, their white and brown feathers prominent against the beige bunchgrasses.
Biologists working for the Burns Paiute Tribe have counted sage grouse in the area since the early 2000s as part of a collaborative effort to track the populations with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The leks are roughly five miles away from a tribally owned property known as Jonesboro, a former ranch where some sage grouse spend their summer. In 2000, the tribe reacquired these 6,385 acres of unceded ancestral lands along with a 1,760-acre property called Logan Valley. Tribal officials have worked to restore both properties for wildlife such as grouse, mule deer and elk, giving tribal members access for hunting and gathering.
“We don’t just consider the management of things in terms of their value to us,” Teeman said, speaking of the Paiute approach to ecosystem stewardship. “The management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood,” she continued, “as opposed to how BLM or any of the other Western-oriented management systems work where everything is a resource.”
“…management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood.”
Before the tribe purchased the Jonesboro site, livestock had grazed it for decades. Weeds choked out native vegetation. Federal fire-suppression policies and overgrazing led to an expansion of juniper trees.
Since reacquiring the property, the tribe has worked to undo this colonial legacy in ways that could also be applied to federal lands.
In the early 2000s, the tribe removed some fencing at Jonesboro. Tribal staff, like Williams and Hanneman, have overseen projects to cut junipers to clear space for grouse, which avoid forested areas. They’ve planted sagebrush, yarrow, rabbitbrush and buckwheat. But weed removal has required the most intensive work: To remove cheatgrass and medusahead, the tribe mows, burns, sprays herbicide — and grazes.
The Jonesboro site came with 21,242 acres of BLM allotments as well as 4,154 acres of state grazing allotments overseen by the Oregon Department of State Lands. The tribe subleases these grazing permits to local ranchers for some income, but its priority is not beef production. “Our focus is definitely wildlife and wildlife conservation,” Williams said. Grazing is used to target weeds and clear thatch when native grasses are dormant, but the tribe allows just one-third of the cattle that it could graze under its BLM permit. Only so many acres are good for grazing, Williams said, typically places near streams or springs that are critical habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife. With fewer cows, the native animals have more plants to eat.
The tribe also gives the Jonesboro pastures regular rest from cattle. Cows spend 10 days grazing in small, 40- to 60-acre fenced pastures on tribal land and are then typically removed. On larger, 3,000- to 13,000-acre federal pastures subleased to local ranchers, the tribe requires ranchers remove the animals after one to two months.
These efforts are slowly transforming the property. Photographs taken by tribal biologists from 2007 until 2018 to track restoration progress show a greener landscape. Riparian vegetation is taking over an abandoned road; more bunchgrasses are growing.
In southeastern Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are also evaluating ways to reduce grazing’s impact. Led by Denny, the tribes’Natural Resources Division is studying 320,000 acres of rangeland on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to reassess the number of cows allowed. Much of the reservation is grazed by cattle, though only a third of the animals are owned by tribal members, some of whom grew up in ranching families. About 20,500 acres of the reservation’s rangelands are off-limits to grazing. The tribes also own another 33,000 acres of conservation land where grazing is prohibited, said Preston Buckskin, the tribes’ land-use director and a tribal member. They have also considered barring cattle from some sage grouse mating sites.
Buckskin has struggled over the years to find a compromise between traditional tribal values that prioritize conservation and the business of ranching, which keeps some families afloat. Tribal cattlemen have influenced land-management decisions on the reservation for generations. The tribes’ Office of Public Affairs said in a written statement that, while it’s important to not minimize grazing’s impact on sage grouse habitat, “effective conservation outcomes depend on collaboration among producers, land managers, and tribes rather than placing responsibility on any single group.”
As one potential compromise, the tribal land-use department is considering a program that would pay landowners to quit grazing. Non-Native conservation organizations like the Western Watersheds Projecthave pushed a similar approach on federal lands for years. Most recently, in October, Democratic Reps. Adam Smith, Jared Huffman and Eleanor Holmes Norton reintroduced legislation that would allow ranchers to relinquish their grazing privileges in exchange for buyouts by private individuals or groups.
Additionally, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are working on a land-use plan that would reclassify some areas zoned as “rangelands” on the reservation as “wildlands” instead, ensuring that the land is valued for wildlife and tribal hunting. “Words shape expectations,” Denny said. “‘Rangeland’” implies that the land is for livestock. “It carries a meaning imposed by a different way of thinking,” he said. “I prefer the term ‘sagebrush steppe.’”
IN THE EARLY 1990S, HART Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southern Oregon was severely overgrazed. When then-manager Barry Reiswig made the controversial decision to prohibit cattle on the property, he was characterized by some locals as the “epitome of evil,” according to Rewilding a Mountain, a 2019 documentary about the project. “We were under a lot of pressure to compromise, to kind of look the other way,” Reiswig said, speaking of grazing’s impact on the refuge, in the film.
But it didn’t take long for a landscape that had been grazed for 120 years to repair itself. In 12 years, aspen increased by 64% and wildflowers multiplied by 68%. In 23 years, bare soil decreased by 90%. Rushes and willows quadrupled, a 2015 study by Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers found.
Today, the refuge is one of the largest ungrazed areas in the Great Basin and one of the largest sage grouse breeding grounds in the West. Female grouse are commonly seen with chicks in tow, scurrying across gravel roads and foraging in wet meadows. “Simply removing cattle from areas may be all that is required to restore many degraded riparian areas in the American West,” the 2015 study concluded.
Grazing’s highly politicized nature makes it difficult for scientists and state and federal agency officials to even broach the subject, Denny said. “We’ve got to get uncomfortable talking about the truth.” Tribes, he said, can lead the conversation, as well as show the way. “We can use our homelands as, like, ‘This is the model for how you navigate this.’”
But progress ultimately relies on the federal government’s willingness to reform its policies, as a spring day on Burns Paiute land demonstrated.
Just north of the headwaters of the Malheur River, in a forest clearing below the snowy Strawberry Mountains, a few sage grouse have found an unexpected summer home in a portion of Logan Valley that once again belongs to the tribe. The birds’ preferred species of sage, mountain big sage, grows on a gentle slope that rises above a nearby creek. Last year, by mid-May, bluebells and yellow groundsels — wildflowers favored by grouse — were starting to bloom in the mountain meadow.
It’s a mystery where the grouse come from, Hanneman said. The open valley is surrounded by lodgepole and ponderosa pines. “It’s pretty dangerous for a sage grouse to be moving through a forest with Cooper’s hawks and goshawks and everything else.” The closest known lek is 10 miles away.
To understand the birds’ movements, the tribe received a grant from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation to purchase transmitters to place on grouse this summer. The data will help tribal biologists understand where the birds travel, informing efforts to conserve their migration corridor. Since cultural burning was prohibited by the federal government more than a century ago, trees have encroached on the area. The tribe has hand-cut 60 acres of pines to keep the sagebrush open for grouse and other wildlife. They also hope to return fire to the meadows.
Most of the 1,760-acre Logan Valley property has been ungrazed since the tribe reacquired it in 2000. Officials permit cattle only on a 300-acre meadow to control a non-native grass that settlers introduced as a source of hay and forage for cows.
But the tribe’s propertyborders federal land: It forms a “Y” shape, following creeks that merge to form the Malheur River, and the Forest Service, which owns the land in between the water, allows cows to graze from June to October.
Trespassing cattle have been an issue for years. The fencing is old, and cows get through. The tribe puts up a temporary fence at the end of May to keep the cattle off its land once the animals return to the neighboring federal property in June.
On a site visit in mid-May, Hanneman drove a dirt road that cuts through the property. He slowed down. “I did not know they put cattle out already,” he said. A dozen black cows stared at him.
It was two weeks early, and the temporary fence had yet to be erected. Despite the tribe’s best efforts, cows had gotten in.
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This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The bird and the herd.”
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